Universities, the Internet, and the Information Commons

Hal Abelson [email protected]

MIT Dept. of Electrical. Eng. and Computer. Sci.

MIT Council on Educational Technology

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Question

: How is the Internet going to be used in education, and what is your university going to do about it?

• An answer from the MIT Faculty is this: Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.

MIT President Charles Vest President’s Report, Fall 2001

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• The concept, as announced April 2001 – MIT will put all its course content, undergraduate and graduate, into Web-based format – The OCW Website will be open and freely available to the world – MIT will commit to OCW as a permanent, sustainable activity – Plan: 50-course pilot for Sept. 02. Commitment to have 500 courses published by Sept. 03.

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Site Highlights

4 Syllabus 4 Course Calendar 4 Lecture Notes 4 Assignments 4 Exams 4 Problem/Solution Sets 4 Labs and Projects 4 Hypertextbooks 4 Simulations 4 Tools and Tutorials 4 Video Lectures 4

Legal fine print

• Participation by faculty is voluntary • Faculty retain copyright, but grant MIT an irrevocable nonexclusive license to include their material in OCW • MIT publishes OCW under a Creative Commons license – Attribution – Noncommercial – Share-alike 5

OCW Site Traffic

MIT OCW Monthly Traffic (since 10/1/03) 6

Traffic by Geographic Region (in Web hits, since 10/1/03)

137.2 M

Region

North America East Asia Western Europe South Asia Latin America Eastern Europe and Central Asia MENA Pacific Sub-Sahar. Africa TOTAL HITS

Hits Since 10/1/03 Hit %

137,154,920 43.5

61,706,485 50,372,337 19,558,358 17,826,440 19.6

16.0

6.2

5.7

13,942,007 7,748,165 4,249,296 2,551,284 4.4

2.5

1.3

0.8

315,109,292 17.8 M 50.4 M 7.8 M 2.6 M 13.9 M 19.6 M 61.7 M 4.3 M

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Countries with most hits in October 2004 (outside of U.S.)

Country

1 China 2 3 4 India Taiwan Canada 6 7 8 9 South Korea Germany France Brazil 10 Italy

Web Hits

2,127,727 1,919,088 1,760,944 1,337,334 1,026,644 954,124 717,634 665,014 587,039 576,179

Country

11 Japan 12 Turkey 13 Spain 14 Pakistan 15 Singapore 16 Australia 17 Czech Republic 18 Netherlands 19 Mexico 20 Vietnam

Web Hits

559,389 480,554 440,210 413,360 411,290 383,359 364,671 313,102 301,440 279,080

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Traffic from 3200 universities, colleges (since 10/1/03) University 1 2 Natl. Univ. of Singapore National Taiwan Univ.

3 4 5 6 Harvard University Stanford University Georgia Tech Univ.

Purdue University 7 8 9 10 Columbia University University of Michigan Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana National Chiao Tung Univ. (Taiwan) Visits 11,245 10,816 5,915 3,334 3,175 3,154 3,046 2,976 2,884 2,812 University 11 Cambridge University 13 Cornell University Visits 2,750 2,747 2,730 2,683 16 Univ. of Washington 17 Boston University 18 University of Texas 19 Univ. of Pennsylvania 2,498 2,407 2,406 2,369 2,283 2,278

User profiles

› 55% of educators teach at 4-year colleges or the equivalent › 49% of educators have less than five years teaching experience

13% Educators 4% 31% Students Self-learners 52%

OCW Use data

Use Scenario Planning, developing or teaching a course Enhancing personal knowledge Planning curriculum Other Complementing a subject currently taking Enhancing personal knowledge Planning future course of study Other Enhancing personal knowledge Learning subject matter—course not available for study Planning future course of study Other

5.7% response rate on 21,500 surveys

% of Use 36% 22% 10% 32% 43% 40% 10% 7% 81% 9% 8% 2%

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OCW Recognition

January 29, 2003 Kyoto (Japan) Digital Archive Project October 15, 2003 Microsoft Internet Biz Solution of Year October 21, 2003 Mass. Interactive Media Council (2) November 10, 2003 InfoWorld 100 Award April 20, 2004 The Webby Awards C E R T I F I E D ……………………… Business Solutions Partner June 7, 2004 ComputerWorld Honors Program September 29, 2004 Digital Education Achievement Award October 18, 2004 MarCom Creative Awards (2)

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OCW Translations

• 60 courses in Spanish and Portuguese through Universia.net partnership • Individual courses in 10 languages • Extensive translation efforts beginning in China and Taiwan 13

Other OCWs are beginning to appear • Some using MIT materials, some using the format, some using the idea 14

OpenCourseware: Alignment with MIT Core Values • Commoditizing the “content” sharpens our focus on the substantive values of residential education: personal attention from faculty and participation in learning and research communities • “Giving it away” helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the university from its mission to disseminate knowledge 15

DSpace

• Vision – A federated repository that makes available the collective intellectual resources of the world's leading research institutions • Mission – Create a scalable digital repository that preserves and communicates the intellectual output of MIT's faculty and researchers – Support adoption by and federation with other institutions • Implemented by MIT Libraries staff working together with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and the World Wide Web Consortium 16

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Range of DSpace content at MIT

• Preprints, articles • Technical reports • Working papers • Conference papers • Theses • Datasets – Statistical, geospatial, biological, etc.

• Images – Visual, scientific, etc.

• Audio and video recordings of lectures, and other multimedia objects • Learning objects • Reformatted digital library collections DSpace will be the archive for OpenCourseWare 24

DSpace Technology

• Open-source implementation, freely available • A digital library standard and architecture including: – Metadata based on Web Consortium’s RDF – Access control – Collection management tools – Federation architecture 25

DSpace Federation

• Initial partners with MIT are Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, and Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington • Will help drive DSpace development – Content to test interoperability – Digital preservation expertise • Federation plan and governance structure being developed with funding from the Mellon Foundation • Beyond the Federation, about 140 known DSpace adopters, over 10,000 downloads of DSpace software 26

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MIT OPEN COURSEWARE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Two coordinated initiatives to strengthen the information commons 35

Companion visions

• OpenCourseWare vision: Global access to the raw material from which the world’s great learning institutions create educational experiences for their students • DSpace vision: Global access to the collective intellectual resources of the world’s leading research institutions through a federation of institutional archives 36

Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare?

• To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

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From MIT’s Mission Statement

The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge , and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. 38

Fundamental Questions about the Role of the Institution

• OpenCourseWare: What should be the university’s

institutional role

in disseminating and preserving our educational contributions?

• DSpace: What should be the university’s

institutional role

in preserving and disseminating our educational

and

our research contributions?

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (2)

• To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (2)

• To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

• Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed.

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University of Southern California

As an academic institution,

USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property

. It is antithetical to this purpose for USC to play any part, even inadvertently, in the violation of the intellectual property rights of others. September 2002, letter to USC students from the Dean of Libraries 42

University of Chicago

The creation and dissemination of knowledge is a collective enterprise at a university. ... Even when faculty members teach a class that they have prepared at home with their own materials, the work is itself supported by the salary the faculty members enjoy and all the other support —intellectual, financial, logistical, and otherwise —that the University provides. ...

For this reason, we recommend that the University formally implement the principle that

the University owns the intellectual property the faculty create at the University

substantial aid of its facilities or its financial support.

or with

Approved by the Council of the University Senate on April 27, 1999.

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Many students probably create a work that would infringe a faculty member's copyright, that is, they base their notes on and incorporate her particular expression rather than just state facts and ideas she articulates in more detail. Faculty members have always permitted this kind of activity without actually talking about it. They “implicitly” license students to create a “derivative work” from the lecture. The license is implied through academic tradition -- students are expected to take notes. … Now faculty may wish to make the implied license explicit and add some restrictions. A limited license to take notes could be very important to protecting the intellectual content of lecture materials … University of Texas, Office of the General Counsel, August 2001 http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/lectures.htm

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The suggested license … Written and verbal instructions at the beginning of class could look something like this:

My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.

University of Texas, Office of the General Counsel, August 2001 http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/lectures.htm

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Conflating “freedom of inquiry” with “freedom of property”

Intellectual property law … embodies the notion that the only forms of cultural work that can be “protected” are those that can be owned. … … the conflation of property rights and “academic rights” participates in a set of discourses … in which freedom can only be understood to mean “individual free enterprise.” In retelling this tale academics risk losing a language for talking about knowledge as other than private property and the university as other than economically “useful.” Corynne McSherry,

Who Owns Academic Work?

(2001) 46

Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (3)

• To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

• Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed .

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Why should universities build repositories like DSpace and OpenCourseWare? (3)

• To help pursue our mission as institutions of higher education and scholarly research.

• Without initiatives like these, traditional academic values will be increasingly marginalized, and university communities will be increasingly stressed.

• To keep a seat at the table in decisions about the disposition of knowledge in the information age.

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Challenges to universities from the “propertization” of scientific publication

• Cost • Imposition of arbitrary, inconsistent rules • Impediments to new tools that could aid scholarly research • Danger of monopoly ownership and control of the scientific literature 49

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If people were asked to sign a petition to do away with paying tax, many would sign. But they then might be the first to complain about deteriorating infrastructure and lower standards of public service. The publication of research is a serious business yet only costs a fraction of the funding of that research.

Robert Campbell, President Blackwell Science, Ltd.

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Scientific literature as property: The basic deal

• Scientist authors give their property away to the journal publishers. • Publishers own this property and all rights to it forever, and they magnanimously allow the scientist author to retain some limited rights that are determined at the publisher’s sole discretion.

• The university generally gets no specific rights.

• And the public doesn’t enter into this deal at all.

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Some rights generously granted to authors by the Association for Computing Machinery

• the right to reuse any portion of the work, without fee, in future works of the author's own, including books, lectures and presentations • the right to revise the work • the right to post author-prepared versions of the work … in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others … ACM COPYRIGHT POLICY, Version 4 Revised 11/01/02 www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/ 53

Some rights generously granted to authors by Elsevier

• the right to include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially) • the right to present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of such paper or article to the delegates attending the meeting; • the right to prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book length form, … • the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final article … on the author's personal or institutional web site or server 54 authors.elsevier.com - 2004

Some rights generously granted to authors by the Journal of the American Chemical Society

• Authors may distribute or transmit their own paper to not more than 50 colleagues • Authors may post the title, abstract (no other text), tables, and figures from their own papers on their own Web sites paragon.acs.org - 2004 55

and from the New England Journal of Medicine…

The Massachusetts Medical Society is the owner of all copyright to any work published by the Society. … The Society and its licensees have the right to use, reproduce, transmit, derive works from, publish, and distribute the contribution, in the Journal or otherwise, in any form or medium. Authors will not use or authorize the use of the contribution without the Society’s written consent, except as may be allowed by U.S. fair-use law.

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We make this deal because …

Maintaining the integrity of the publication process is vital, be it in print or online. … It is not a process that should be ceded to unknown individuals … Copyright should not be ceded to individual authors who would not be able to undertake the job of protecting their work from the introduction of errors.

Ira Mellman, Editor,

Journal of Cell Biology

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What’s valuable for promoting the progress of science?

• Quality publications and a publication process with integrity, certainly. But also … • Open, extensible indexes into publications • Automatic extraction of relevant selections from publications • Automatic compilation of publication fragments • Static and dynamic links among publications, publication fragments, and primary data • Data mining across multiple publications • Automatic linking of publications to visualization tools • Integration into the semantic web • And hundreds of things no one has thought of yet 58

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Will sophisticated research tools

• Be stillborn by limited access to quality sources?

• Or • Stimulate network effects that lead to further concentration and monopolization of the scientific literature?

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One publisher’s view

We aim to give scientists desktop access to all the information they need, for a value of the content and the context in

private monopoly control

which it is presented are reflected in the made available to researchers under licenses accorded to their institutes, and they have all the access they wish.

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promoting the progress of science and the useful arts production quality assurance creation review dissemination selection preservation authoritative source new access tools indexing data mining Institutional players jockeying for influence and control For-profit publishers Non-profit publishers Professional societies

…

Will universities have a seat at the bargaining table?

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promoting the progress of science and the useful arts production quality assurance creation review dissemination selection preservation authoritative source new access tools indexing data mining Institutional players jockeying for influence and control For-profit publishers Non-profit publishers Professional societies

…

Will

creators

have a seat at the bargaining table?

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Copyright law makes it difficult to build on each other’s work

© all rights reserved public domain: no rights reserved

might not be the right choice for all of the people all of the time.

This is the default.

might be the right choice for some of the people some of the time.

This

is surprisingly hard to do.

controlled sharing: some rights reserved

might be the right choice for more of the people more of the time.

This requires lawyers to write and interpret licenses.

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Copyright licenses for people who understand that innovation and new ideas come from building off exisiting ones.

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Summary

• Universities have core institutional reasons to support the information commons • Universities can establish institutional mechanisms that support the information commons.

• Everyone can support the commons by using Creative Commons licenses 80

END

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Universities, as institutions, pre-date the “information economy” by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to

pass the torch of civilization

, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would be information empires… Universities do not merely “leak information” but vigorously broadcast free thought. Bruce Sterling,

The Hacker Crackdown

(1992) 82

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